Suicide's Girlfriend by Elizabeth Evans Page A

grammar drills; a good thing, yet sometimes the sluggish flow of student invention drives him to distraction. This morning, he corrected the girl, “That’s ‘and,’ Dep, not ‘but.’”
    However, didn’t an unvoiced thought make Dep’s “but” sensible? I know I will never see my best friend again, but I will never forget her.
    He ought to apologize, really. For knowing what the girl meant but asking for greater precision.
    And asking for greater precision?
    And still asking for greater precision.
    Sometimes, Crocker wonders if Dep might be a grown woman, not a girl at all: a small woman in a high school full of big kids.
    Once upon a time, this Dep had eight brothers and sisters; and, more important, a place in an immortal chain of ancestral graves andrice fields. For a good long while—lacking a Vietnamese equivalent for the word “I”—Dep referred to herself as “your student.” These days, she resides in a county youth home, a yellowing building that appears to have been gnawed upon by its residents: besides Dep, five American girls and two American boys, all of whom either ran away from home or were kicked out.
    â€œDo you practice your English at dinner?” Crocker once asked. Dep shook her head emphatically. Her shiny, chin-length hair flew out from her head and slapped at her cheeks. “They monsters,” she whispered. Crocker nodded in sympathy. He told her a story of how, once, after traveling home from college, he sat down at the supper table with his own nine brothers and sisters, and no one even noticed his presence.
    Dep smiled into her hands. “Maybe, Mista Crocka, no one notice you gone!” she said.
    Quite a bit of time passed before Crocka, understood that the girl did not tease him; that her words would be taken for comfort in her world, where the family made a circle that went around and around and around.

    â€œCrocker!” Behind him, parked in the glare of one of the car wash stalls, two of his students—Pakistani brothers. The younger one, nicknamed Pop, waves from the backseat of a large red convertible; Ahmad smokes a cigarette and lolls against the car.
    Do they know they must not begin to wash that car with its top down? What are they doing with the top down in this weather, anyway? And how could they possibly own such a car?
    Crocker waves to the boys as he puts the vacuum hose back in place. He has gotten the best of the coconut, but feels absurd.
    How could you redeem the world without putting out all human consciousness?
    The sort of question that makes Crocker hungry.
    â€œOne minute!” he calls to the boys. “Wait one minute!”
    A convenience market sits across the parking lot from the car wash, and Crocker walks rapidly in its direction.
    Perhaps everyone feels vaguely criminal in a convenience market, where deterrence of crime affects everything: the layout, the friendliness masking raving suspicion, the lighting, the mirrors, the notes to potential robbers. Think of that! “Cashier keeps no more than twenty dollars in change. Cashier does not have access to safe.”
    â€œQuik,” write Crocker’s students. “Cheez.” “Cum.”
    Ahmad and Pop. Initially, they entered Crocker’s classes with bowed heads, wore wide-sleeved white shirts, stayed after unbidden to wipe the blackboards. Now they like tight denim and playing nasty tricks; they slyly deposit gobs of phlegm in the hair of studying classmates, knock over pails of cafeteria slops, put an occasional spin on the wheelchairs of handicapped kids.
    Crocker carries two twin-packs of the coconut pastries to the counter. One each for the students, another for himself. And should neither boy want the fourth pastry, Crocker promises himself he will chuck the thing in a waste bin.
    Behind the cash register, the face of the young clerk looks hot, like the faces of cafeteria workers, people bent over steam